Wonder how many are still alive_________________JO911B.
"for we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the darkness of this world, against wicked spirits in high places " Eph.6 v 12

Today’s interview in the Indian Express newspaper with an eyewitness survivor of the Mumbai shootings throws a spanner in to the works of the official story that the suspected militants killed in the attacks were all from Pakistan:

“56-year-old Harishchandra Shrivardhankar can clearly recall his attacker (at Cama hospital). He described the terrorist as a fair skinned, 5.5 to 6 feet-tall person speaking in Hindi. The terrorist, says Shrivardhankar, was dressed in a pathani style off-white or cream-coloured kutra and pyjama.” (Pathani kurta is a type of Hindu suit.)

Let’s hope Mr Shrivardhankar recovers from his wounds and is able to identify that person...

Eyewitness to the shooting of Hemant Karkare was injured Constable Arun Jadhav who was traveling in the same vehicle. Again Indian Express reported:

“Karkare, encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar and Additional Commissioner of Police Ashok Kamte, who were all travelling in the same vehicle, were shot dead along with three constables by the terrorists.

The top officers were on way to Cama Hospital, just a 10-minute drive from CST station, to check on another injured officer Sadanand Date.

"Five minutes later, two persons carrying AK-47 rifles emerged from behind a tree and started firing at our vehicle," said Jadhav, who was hit by two bullets in his right arm and is recuperating in the Bombay Hospital.

Very accurate and effective shooting by two gunmen, killing six police – presumably armed and wearing body armor, before driving off in the shot up vehicle. Further, Karkare was shot with three bullets in his chest. “He wore a bullet-proof jacket before going in but the bullets got him anyway,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police Amar Jadhav.

Quite… Why might some have wanted to get rid of Karkare and other senior ATS officers? A reporter from Indian Express spoke to Karkare 36 hours before he was killed:

“The ATS believed it had cracked the September 29 Malegaon bomb blast case, and about a month ago arrested Hindu extremists in a breakthrough that shocked the nation and added a new twist to the entire discourse on Terror and religion.

The previous evening, hours after our meeting, TV channels had ‘breaking news’ that he had received a fresh death threat from some unidentified caller, apparently in connection with the Malegaon probe. An Indian Express reporter SMSed him asking him if this was true or if he had anything to say. His reply: just a smiley.”

Recent press reports on developments with regard to last month’s attacks in Mumbai, India indicate the role of Dawood Ibrahim, a wanted crime boss, terrorist, and drug trafficker, is being downplayed, possibly the result of a deal taking place behind the scenes between the governments of the US, Pakistan, and India, to have others involved in the Mumbai attacks turned over while quietly diverting attention from a man who some say could reveal embarrassing secrets about the CIA’s involvement in criminal enterprises.

December 10, 2008

by Jeremy R. Hammond

Quote:

The role in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month of an underworld kingpin that heads an organization known as D-Company, has known ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and who is alleged to have ties with the CIA is apparently being whitewashed, suggesting that his capture and handover to India might prove inconvenient for either the ISI or the CIA, or both.

It was Dawood Ibrahim who was initially characterized by press reports as being the mastermind behind the attacks. Now, that title of “mastermind” is being given to Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi by numerous media accounts reporting that Pakistan security forces have raided a training camp of the group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which evidence has indicated was behind the attacks. Lakhvi was reportedly captured in the raid and is now in custody.

At the same time Ibrahim’s role is being downplayed, Lakhvi’s known role is being exaggerated. Initial reports described him as the training specialist for LeT, but the major media outlets like the New York Times and the London Times, citing government sources, have since promoted his status to that of commander of operations for the group.

The only terrorist from the Mumbai attacks to be captured alive, Azam Amir Kasab, characterized Ibrahim, not Lakhvi, as the mastermind of those attacks, according to earlier press accounts.

Kasab reportedly told his interrogators that he and his fellow terrorists were trained under Lakhvi, also known as “Chacha”, at a camp in Pakistan. Indian officials also traced calls from a satellite phone used by the terrorists to Lakhvi.

But the phone had also been used to call Yusuf Muzammil, also known as Abu Yusuf, Abu Hurrera, and “Yahah”. And it has been Muzammil, not Lakhvi, who has previously been described as the military commander of LeT. It was an intercepted call to Muzammil on November 18 that put the Indian Navy and Coast Guard on high alert to be on the lookout for any foreign vessels from Pakistan entering Indian waters.

Kasab told his interrogators that his team had set out from Karachi, Pakistan, on a ship belonging to Dawood Ibrahim, the MV Alpha. They then hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, the Kuber, to pass through Indian territorial waters to elude the Navy and Coast Guard that were boarding and searching suspect ships.

Although the MV Alpha was subsequently found and seized by the Indian Navy, there have been few, if any, developments about this aspect of the investigation in press accounts, such as whether it has been confirmed or not that the ship was owned by Ibrahim.

Upon arriving off the coast near the city, they were received by inflatable rubber dinghies that had been arranged by an associate of Ibrahim’s in Mumbai.

The planning and execution of the attacks are indicative of the mastermind role not of either Lakhvi or Muzammil, but of Ibrahim, an Indian who is intimately familiar with the city. It was in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) that Ibrahim rose through the ranks of the underworld to become a major organized crime boss.

At least two other Indians were also connected to the attacks, Mukhtar Ahmed and Tausef Rahman. They were arrested for their role in obtaining SIM cards used in the cell phones of the terrorists. Ahmed, according to Indian officials, had in fact been recruited by a special counter-insurgency police task force as an undercover operative. His exact role is still being investigated.

One of the SIM cards used was possibly purchased from New Jersey. Investigators are looking into this potential link to the US, as well.

Dawood Ibrahim went from underworld kingpin to terrorist in 1993, when he was connected to a series of bombings in Bombay that resulted in 250 deaths. He is wanted by Interpol and was designated by the US as a global terrorist in 2003.

It’s believed Ibrahim has been residing in Karachi, and Indian officials have accused Pakistan’s ISI of protecting him.

Ibrahim is known to be a major drug trafficker responsible for shipping narcotics into the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), most Afghan opium (or its derivative, heroin, which is increasingly being produced in the country before export) is smuggled through Iran and Turkey en route by land to Europe; but the percentage that goes to Pakistan seems to mostly find its way directly to the UK, either by plane or by ship.

Afghanistan is the world’s leading producer of opium, a trend that developed during the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort to oust the Soviet Union from the country, with the drug trade serving to help finance the war.

The principle recipient of CIA-ISI funding was Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, one of the major drug lords. Hekmatyar has since joined with the Taliban in the insurgency effort to expel foreign forces from the country – not the Soviet Union, this time, but the US.

A Taliban ban on the cultivation of opium poppies in 2000 resulted in the near total eradication of the crop. But since the US overthrow of the regime in 2001, Afghanistan has once again become the world’s leading producer of opium, surpassing all previous records.

While Hekmatyar chose to side with anti-government forces, a number of other warlords involved in the drug trade were members of the Northern Alliance to whom the CIA doled out cash in the US effort to overthrow the Taliban following the 9/11 attacks.

One such warlord is Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was appointed Chief of Staff of the army under the government of Hamid Karzai, and who has been described in US intelligence’s own files as a “Tier One Warlord”.

That list includes a number of other high ranking officials within the Afghanistan government, including former defense minister and parliament member Marshal Mohammad Fahim, Interior Minister for Counter-Narcotics General Mohammad Daoud, and former governor of Helmand province (now by far the largest producer of opium) Sher Mohammed Akhundzada.

Although government officials parroted by the mainstream media tend to characterize the Afghan opium trade as being controlled by the Taliban, in fact the estimated drug profits of all anti-government elements (AGEs) is a mere fraction of the trade’s total estimated export value. The UNODC estimated the export value this year at $3.4 billion. Of that, AGEs profited between $250-470 million, less than 14% of the total trade. Moreover, what fraction of that percentage has gone specifically to the Taliban as opposed to other AGEs is unknown.

Furthermore, while the Taliban profits from the production of opium through ushr, a 10% tax on all agricultural products, and possibly through a protection racket in which it receives compensation for providing security along smuggling routes, the UNODC has acknowledged that there is little indication that the Taliban itself is responsible for either the actual production or trafficking of the drug.

This is an inconvenient truth for the US, which has so far managed through its propaganda efforts to successfully obfuscate the truth about the Afghan drug trade and portray the Taliban as being almost wholly responsible.

A known drug trafficker, Dawood Ibrahim is naturally also involved in money laundering, which is perhaps where the role of gambling operations in Nepal comes into the picture.

Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times, wrote last month after the Mumbai attacks that Ibrahim had worked with the US to help finance the mujahedeen during the 1980s and that because he knows too much about the US’s “darker secrets” in the region, he could never be allowed to be turned over to India.

The recent promotion of Lakhvi to “mastermind” of the attacks while Ibrahim’s name disappears from media reports would seem to lend credence to Shimatsu’s assertion.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen similarly reported that according to intelligence sources, Dawood Ibrahim is a CIA asset, both as a veteran of the mujahedeen war and in a continuing connection with his casino and drug trade operations in Kathmandu, Nepal. A deal had been made earlier this year to have Pakistan hand Ibrahim over to India, but the CIA was fearful that this would lead to too many of its dirty secrets coming to light, including the criminal activities of high level personnel within the agency.

One theory on the Mumbai attacks is that it was backlash for this double-cross that was among other things intended to serve as a warning that any such arrangement could have further serious consequences.

Although designated as a major international terrorist by the US, media reports in India have characterized the US’s past interest in seeing Ibrahim handed over as less than enthusiastic. Former Indian Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani wrote in his memoir, “My Country My Life”, that he made a great effort to get Pakistan to hand over Ibrahim, and met with then US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (now Secretary of State) to pressure Pakistan to do so. But he was informed by Powell that Pakistan would hand over Ibrahim only “with some strings attached” and that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would need more time before doing so.

The handover, needless to say, never occurred. The Pakistan government has also publicly denied that Ibrahim is even in the country; a denial that was repeated following the recent Mumbai attacks.

Others suspected of involvement in the attacks and named among the 20 individuals India wants Pakistan to turn over also have possible connections to the CIA, including Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founder of LeT, and Maulana Masood Azhar, both veterans of the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort.

Azhar had been captured in 1994 and imprisoned in India for his role as leader of the Pakistani-based terrorist group Karkut-ul-Mujahideen. He was released, however, in 1999 in exchange for hostages from the takeover of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was hijacked during its flight from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi, India and redirected to Afghanistan. After Azhar’s release, he formed Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), which was responsible for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that led Pakistan and India to the brink of war. LeT was also blamed for the attack alongside JeM.

Both LeT and JeM have links to the ISI, which has used the groups as proxies in the conflict with India over the territory of Kashmir.

Hafiz Saeed travelled to Peshawar to join the mujahedeen cause during the Soviet-Afghan war. Peshawar served as the base of operations for the CIA, which worked closely with the ISI to finance, arm, and train the mujahedeen. It was in Peshawar that Saeed became the protégé of Abdullah Azzam, who founded an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) along with a Saudi individual named Osama bin Laden.

MAK worked alongside the CIA-ISI operations to recruit Arabs to the ranks of the mujahedeen. The ISI, acting as proxy for the CIA, chose mainly to channel its support to Afghans, such as Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. The U.S. claims the CIA had no relationship with MAK, but bin Laden’s operation, which later evolved into “al-Qaeda”, must certainly have been known to, and approved by, the CIA.

But there are indications that the CIA’s relationship with MAK and al-Qaeda go well beyond having shared a common enemy and mutual interests in the Soviet-Afghan war. A number of al-Qaeda associates appear to have been protected individuals.

Branches of MAK existed elsewhere, including in the United States. The US Treasury Department lists one of MAK’s aliases as Al-Kifah. The Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York, served as a recruitment center during the 1980s, but its operations did not end after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Kifah was also a recruitment center for efforts by extremist groups in the Balkans.

Just as in Afghanistan, the US also had mutual interests with Bosnian Muslims and extremist groups acting in the Balkans. MAK had since evolved into al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden, which had links to groups operating in Bosnia. Despite an arms embargo against such groups, they managed to obtain weapons and supply shipments in which the US at best looked the other way and at worst played an active role.

The operations to arm al-Qaeda linked groups in Bosnia were carried under the watch of then director of the US European Command Intelligence Directorate Gen. Michael V. Hayden. Hayden subsequently served as the director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and is currently the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, which is the head of the CIA.

A former official at the US consular office in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Michael Springman went public after 9/11 to explain how his office was used by the CIA to bring recruits to the US for training during the 1980s.

The Jeddah office is where most of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas to enter the US.

Two other of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were in fact known to the CIA and were being monitored. Despite being known al-Qaeda operatives, they were allowed to enter the US under their real names and neither the FBI nor the State Department were notified.

The US explains this as the result of the CIA losing the terrorists’ trail when they travelled to Thailand after an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. But this explanation does not stand up to scrutiny since it was known that they had obtained visas to enter the US. Thus, even if the CIA did in fact lose track of the terrorists, standard procedure should have dictated that the FBI and State Department be alerted.

The 9/11 Joint Inquiry and subsequent 9/11 Commission were apparently satisfied with the CIA’s explanation that it lost al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, and nobody was ever held accountable for the “mistake” of knowingly allowing two known al-Qaeda operatives on the terrorist watchlist to enter the United States unhindered.

Upon arriving in the US, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were assisted by an individual under FBI surveillance for his possible connections to terrorist groups and, furthermore, even lived in a house rented from an FBI informant. But the FBI claims that it didn’t know anything about the men, despite them using their real names and being listed in the phone book, because the CIA hadn’t informed them the two were in the country. The Joint Inquiry report described this as perhaps the single greatest missed opportunity to break up the 9/11 operation and prevent the attacks.

Additionally, it was in fact the CIA who not once, but at least on six separate occasions, approved a visa, including from the office in Jeddah, for or the entry of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. “the Blind Sheikh”, into the US, despite his known connection to terrorist acts in Egypt, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and despite having been on the State Department’s terrorist watchlist. This, too, was described as a series of “mistakes” after the government was forced to admit that it had occurred – an explanation that the New York Times, which reported this information in a series of articles, seemed to find perfectly satisfactory.

Many, however, find such incompetency and coincidence theories to be simply not credible, preferring instead alternative, oftentimes much more plausible, conspiracy theories.

The Blind Sheikh had also travelled to Peshawar during the mujahedeen effort, and was good friends with Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the CIA’s top asset during the Soviet-Afghan war. He later became the spiritual head of the terrorist group that carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a plot which the FBI had known about in advance through two or more informants.

One of the informants served as a bodyguard for the Blind Sheikh and was made responsible for obtaining materials to make the bomb with. Tape recordings he secretly made of conversations with his FBI handlers reveal that the original sting operation involved a plan to replace a chemical used in making the bomb with an inert simulant that would render it inoperative. But this plan was withdrawn by a supervisor at the FBI and the terrorist cell was allowed to go ahead and make a real bomb – which was then used to blow up the World Trade Center.

Another notable character connected to Al-Kifah training and recruitment efforts for al-Qaeda is Ali Mohammed. He also happened to be an in FBI informant, a CIA asset, and a member of the special forces in the US Army. It is Ali Mohammed whom some suspect of actually being the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing. He was later charged in connection to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but has since seemingly disappeared off the map.

After the 9/11 attacks, the investigation into the financing of the attacks led to Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin. According to Indian officials, a joint investigation with the FBI revealed evidence that it was at the direction of the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, that Omar Sheikh transferred $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in Florida.

Omar Sheikh, a known associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured and imprisoned in India for his role in the kidnapping of American and British nationals in 1994. He was released in 1999 along with Maulana Massod Azhar in exchange for the hostages from Flight 814. According to former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, Omar Sheikh was also an agent of Britain’s spy agency, MI6, for whom he served in operations in the Balkans.

Omar Sheikh’s role in the 9/11 attacks has also been downplayed. Mention of him in the media instead focus on his role as the man responsible for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He is currently being held in Pakistan on charges relating to Pearl’s murder.

After Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the 9/11 attacks became known publicly, Musharraf quietly replaced him and the whole affair was hushed up in the US. When a reporter from a foreign news agency asked then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice whether she was aware of the reports that the ISI chief had financed the hijackers and was in Washington meeting with high level officials at the time of the attacks, she denied having seen “that report” and protested that, “he was certainly not meeting with me.”

Interestingly, the White House website transcript of the press briefing censored the words “ISI chief” from the reporter’s question, despite the words clearly being audible in the video of the briefing.

The 9/11 Commission also acted to whitewash Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the attacks. Despite the question of the ISI chief’s involvement being included on a list of items for the Commission to investigate from families of the victims of the attacks, the Commission’s report made no mention of it, either to confirm or deny the information, which, despite having received zero coverage in the US major media (with the one exception of a citation of a report from the Times of India in a blog on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion website), was widely reported internationally (as well as in US alternative media).

Rather, the 9/11 Commission simply acted as though such reports didn’t exist. Despite Bob Graham, one of the chairs of the earlier Congressional Joint Inquiry, publicly stating that he was surprised by the evidence of foreign government involvement (he added that this information would not be made public for another twenty or thirty years when it would be due for release to the national archives), the 9/11 Commission report arrived at the opposite conclusion, saying there was no evidence of any such involvement and, moreover, that the question of who financed the attacks was “of little practical significance”.

Another former head of the ISI is now being privately accused by the US of involvement with the group responsible for the Mumbai attacks, according to reports citing a document listing former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul and four other former heads of Pakistan’s intelligence agency as being involved in supporting terrorist networks. The individuals named have been recommended to the UN Security Council to be named as international terrorists, according to Pakistan’s The News.

The document has been provided to the Pakistan government and also accuses Gul, who was head of the ISI from 1987-1989, of providing assistance to criminal groups in Kabul, as well as to groups responsible for recruiting and training militants to attack US-led forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban.

Hamid Gul responded to the reports by calling the allegations hilarious. The US denied that it had made any such recommendations to the UN.

But the US has similarly accused the ISI of involvement in the bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul last July. This was unusual not because of the allegation of an ISI connection to terrorism but because it was in such stark contrast with US attempts to publicly portray Pakistan as a staunch ally in its “war on terrorism” when the country was under the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf.

The US attitude toward Pakistan shifted once an elected government came to power that has been more willing to side with the overwhelming belief among the public that it is the “war on terrorism” itself that has exacerbated the problem of extremist militant groups and led to further terrorist attacks within the country, such as the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last year or the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in September. While the world’s attention has been focused on the attacks in Mumbai, a bomb blast in Peshawar last week killed 21 and injured 90.

While the purported US document names Gul and others as terrorist supporters, another report, from Indian intelligence, indicates that the terrorists who carried out the attacks in Mumbai were among 500 trained by instructors from the Pakistan military, according to the Sunday edition of The Times. This training of the 10 known Mumbai terrorists would have taken place prior to their recent preparation for these specific attacks by the LeT training specialist Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

But while Lakhvi, Muzammil, and Hafiz Saeed have continued to be named in connection with last month’s attacks in Mumbai, the name of Dawood Ibrahim seems to be either disappearing altogether or his originally designated role as the accused mastermind of the attacks being credited now instead to Lakhvi in media accounts.

Whether this is a deliberate effort to downplay Ibrahim’s role in the attacks so as not to have to force Pakistan to turn him over because of embarrassing revelations pertaining to the CIA’s involvement with known terrorists and drug traffickers that development could possibly produce isn’t certain. But what is certain is that the CIA has had a long history of involvement with such characters and that the US has a track record of attempting to keep information about the nature of such involvement in the dark or to cover it up once it reaches the light of public scrutiny.

_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

Recent press reports on developments with regard to last month’s attacks in Mumbai, India indicate the role of Dawood Ibrahim, a wanted crime boss, terrorist, and drug trafficker, is being downplayed, possibly the result of a deal taking place behind the scenes between the governments of the US, Pakistan, and India, to have others involved in the Mumbai attacks turned over while quietly diverting attention from a man who some say could reveal embarrassing secrets about the CIA’s involvement in criminal enterprises.

December 10, 2008

by Jeremy R. Hammond

Quote:

The role in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month of an underworld kingpin that heads an organization known as D-Company, has known ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and who is alleged to have ties with the CIA is apparently being whitewashed, suggesting that his capture and handover to India might prove inconvenient for either the ISI or the CIA, or both.

It was Dawood Ibrahim who was initially characterized by press reports as being the mastermind behind the attacks. Now, that title of “mastermind” is being given to Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi by numerous media accounts reporting that Pakistan security forces have raided a training camp of the group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which evidence has indicated was behind the attacks. Lakhvi was reportedly captured in the raid and is now in custody.

At the same time Ibrahim’s role is being downplayed, Lakhvi’s known role is being exaggerated. Initial reports described him as the training specialist for LeT, but the major media outlets like the New York Times and the London Times, citing government sources, have since promoted his status to that of commander of operations for the group.

The only terrorist from the Mumbai attacks to be captured alive, Azam Amir Kasab, characterized Ibrahim, not Lakhvi, as the mastermind of those attacks, according to earlier press accounts.

Kasab reportedly told his interrogators that he and his fellow terrorists were trained under Lakhvi, also known as “Chacha”, at a camp in Pakistan. Indian officials also traced calls from a satellite phone used by the terrorists to Lakhvi.

But the phone had also been used to call Yusuf Muzammil, also known as Abu Yusuf, Abu Hurrera, and “Yahah”. And it has been Muzammil, not Lakhvi, who has previously been described as the military commander of LeT. It was an intercepted call to Muzammil on November 18 that put the Indian Navy and Coast Guard on high alert to be on the lookout for any foreign vessels from Pakistan entering Indian waters.

Kasab told his interrogators that his team had set out from Karachi, Pakistan, on a ship belonging to Dawood Ibrahim, the MV Alpha. They then hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, the Kuber, to pass through Indian territorial waters to elude the Navy and Coast Guard that were boarding and searching suspect ships.

Although the MV Alpha was subsequently found and seized by the Indian Navy, there have been few, if any, developments about this aspect of the investigation in press accounts, such as whether it has been confirmed or not that the ship was owned by Ibrahim.

Upon arriving off the coast near the city, they were received by inflatable rubber dinghies that had been arranged by an associate of Ibrahim’s in Mumbai.

The planning and execution of the attacks are indicative of the mastermind role not of either Lakhvi or Muzammil, but of Ibrahim, an Indian who is intimately familiar with the city. It was in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) that Ibrahim rose through the ranks of the underworld to become a major organized crime boss.

At least two other Indians were also connected to the attacks, Mukhtar Ahmed and Tausef Rahman. They were arrested for their role in obtaining SIM cards used in the cell phones of the terrorists. Ahmed, according to Indian officials, had in fact been recruited by a special counter-insurgency police task force as an undercover operative. His exact role is still being investigated.

One of the SIM cards used was possibly purchased from New Jersey. Investigators are looking into this potential link to the US, as well.

Dawood Ibrahim went from underworld kingpin to terrorist in 1993, when he was connected to a series of bombings in Bombay that resulted in 250 deaths. He is wanted by Interpol and was designated by the US as a global terrorist in 2003.

It’s believed Ibrahim has been residing in Karachi, and Indian officials have accused Pakistan’s ISI of protecting him.

Ibrahim is known to be a major drug trafficker responsible for shipping narcotics into the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), most Afghan opium (or its derivative, heroin, which is increasingly being produced in the country before export) is smuggled through Iran and Turkey en route by land to Europe; but the percentage that goes to Pakistan seems to mostly find its way directly to the UK, either by plane or by ship.

Afghanistan is the world’s leading producer of opium, a trend that developed during the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort to oust the Soviet Union from the country, with the drug trade serving to help finance the war.

The principle recipient of CIA-ISI funding was Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, one of the major drug lords. Hekmatyar has since joined with the Taliban in the insurgency effort to expel foreign forces from the country – not the Soviet Union, this time, but the US.

A Taliban ban on the cultivation of opium poppies in 2000 resulted in the near total eradication of the crop. But since the US overthrow of the regime in 2001, Afghanistan has once again become the world’s leading producer of opium, surpassing all previous records.

While Hekmatyar chose to side with anti-government forces, a number of other warlords involved in the drug trade were members of the Northern Alliance to whom the CIA doled out cash in the US effort to overthrow the Taliban following the 9/11 attacks.

One such warlord is Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was appointed Chief of Staff of the army under the government of Hamid Karzai, and who has been described in US intelligence’s own files as a “Tier One Warlord”.

That list includes a number of other high ranking officials within the Afghanistan government, including former defense minister and parliament member Marshal Mohammad Fahim, Interior Minister for Counter-Narcotics General Mohammad Daoud, and former governor of Helmand province (now by far the largest producer of opium) Sher Mohammed Akhundzada.

Although government officials parroted by the mainstream media tend to characterize the Afghan opium trade as being controlled by the Taliban, in fact the estimated drug profits of all anti-government elements (AGEs) is a mere fraction of the trade’s total estimated export value. The UNODC estimated the export value this year at $3.4 billion. Of that, AGEs profited between $250-470 million, less than 14% of the total trade. Moreover, what fraction of that percentage has gone specifically to the Taliban as opposed to other AGEs is unknown.

Furthermore, while the Taliban profits from the production of opium through ushr, a 10% tax on all agricultural products, and possibly through a protection racket in which it receives compensation for providing security along smuggling routes, the UNODC has acknowledged that there is little indication that the Taliban itself is responsible for either the actual production or trafficking of the drug.

This is an inconvenient truth for the US, which has so far managed through its propaganda efforts to successfully obfuscate the truth about the Afghan drug trade and portray the Taliban as being almost wholly responsible.

A known drug trafficker, Dawood Ibrahim is naturally also involved in money laundering, which is perhaps where the role of gambling operations in Nepal comes into the picture.

Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times, wrote last month after the Mumbai attacks that Ibrahim had worked with the US to help finance the mujahedeen during the 1980s and that because he knows too much about the US’s “darker secrets” in the region, he could never be allowed to be turned over to India.

The recent promotion of Lakhvi to “mastermind” of the attacks while Ibrahim’s name disappears from media reports would seem to lend credence to Shimatsu’s assertion.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen similarly reported that according to intelligence sources, Dawood Ibrahim is a CIA asset, both as a veteran of the mujahedeen war and in a continuing connection with his casino and drug trade operations in Kathmandu, Nepal. A deal had been made earlier this year to have Pakistan hand Ibrahim over to India, but the CIA was fearful that this would lead to too many of its dirty secrets coming to light, including the criminal activities of high level personnel within the agency.

One theory on the Mumbai attacks is that it was backlash for this double-cross that was among other things intended to serve as a warning that any such arrangement could have further serious consequences.

Although designated as a major international terrorist by the US, media reports in India have characterized the US’s past interest in seeing Ibrahim handed over as less than enthusiastic. Former Indian Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani wrote in his memoir, “My Country My Life”, that he made a great effort to get Pakistan to hand over Ibrahim, and met with then US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (now Secretary of State) to pressure Pakistan to do so. But he was informed by Powell that Pakistan would hand over Ibrahim only “with some strings attached” and that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would need more time before doing so.

The handover, needless to say, never occurred. The Pakistan government has also publicly denied that Ibrahim is even in the country; a denial that was repeated following the recent Mumbai attacks.

Others suspected of involvement in the attacks and named among the 20 individuals India wants Pakistan to turn over also have possible connections to the CIA, including Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founder of LeT, and Maulana Masood Azhar, both veterans of the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort.

Azhar had been captured in 1994 and imprisoned in India for his role as leader of the Pakistani-based terrorist group Karkut-ul-Mujahideen. He was released, however, in 1999 in exchange for hostages from the takeover of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was hijacked during its flight from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi, India and redirected to Afghanistan. After Azhar’s release, he formed Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), which was responsible for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that led Pakistan and India to the brink of war. LeT was also blamed for the attack alongside JeM.

Both LeT and JeM have links to the ISI, which has used the groups as proxies in the conflict with India over the territory of Kashmir.

Hafiz Saeed travelled to Peshawar to join the mujahedeen cause during the Soviet-Afghan war. Peshawar served as the base of operations for the CIA, which worked closely with the ISI to finance, arm, and train the mujahedeen. It was in Peshawar that Saeed became the protégé of Abdullah Azzam, who founded an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) along with a Saudi individual named Osama bin Laden.

MAK worked alongside the CIA-ISI operations to recruit Arabs to the ranks of the mujahedeen. The ISI, acting as proxy for the CIA, chose mainly to channel its support to Afghans, such as Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. The U.S. claims the CIA had no relationship with MAK, but bin Laden’s operation, which later evolved into “al-Qaeda”, must certainly have been known to, and approved by, the CIA.

But there are indications that the CIA’s relationship with MAK and al-Qaeda go well beyond having shared a common enemy and mutual interests in the Soviet-Afghan war. A number of al-Qaeda associates appear to have been protected individuals.

Branches of MAK existed elsewhere, including in the United States. The US Treasury Department lists one of MAK’s aliases as Al-Kifah. The Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York, served as a recruitment center during the 1980s, but its operations did not end after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Kifah was also a recruitment center for efforts by extremist groups in the Balkans.

Just as in Afghanistan, the US also had mutual interests with Bosnian Muslims and extremist groups acting in the Balkans. MAK had since evolved into al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden, which had links to groups operating in Bosnia. Despite an arms embargo against such groups, they managed to obtain weapons and supply shipments in which the US at best looked the other way and at worst played an active role.

The operations to arm al-Qaeda linked groups in Bosnia were carried under the watch of then director of the US European Command Intelligence Directorate Gen. Michael V. Hayden. Hayden subsequently served as the director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and is currently the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, which is the head of the CIA.

A former official at the US consular office in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Michael Springman went public after 9/11 to explain how his office was used by the CIA to bring recruits to the US for training during the 1980s.

The Jeddah office is where most of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas to enter the US.

Two other of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were in fact known to the CIA and were being monitored. Despite being known al-Qaeda operatives, they were allowed to enter the US under their real names and neither the FBI nor the State Department were notified.

The US explains this as the result of the CIA losing the terrorists’ trail when they travelled to Thailand after an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. But this explanation does not stand up to scrutiny since it was known that they had obtained visas to enter the US. Thus, even if the CIA did in fact lose track of the terrorists, standard procedure should have dictated that the FBI and State Department be alerted.

The 9/11 Joint Inquiry and subsequent 9/11 Commission were apparently satisfied with the CIA’s explanation that it lost al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, and nobody was ever held accountable for the “mistake” of knowingly allowing two known al-Qaeda operatives on the terrorist watchlist to enter the United States unhindered.

Upon arriving in the US, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were assisted by an individual under FBI surveillance for his possible connections to terrorist groups and, furthermore, even lived in a house rented from an FBI informant. But the FBI claims that it didn’t know anything about the men, despite them using their real names and being listed in the phone book, because the CIA hadn’t informed them the two were in the country. The Joint Inquiry report described this as perhaps the single greatest missed opportunity to break up the 9/11 operation and prevent the attacks.

Additionally, it was in fact the CIA who not once, but at least on six separate occasions, approved a visa, including from the office in Jeddah, for or the entry of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. “the Blind Sheikh”, into the US, despite his known connection to terrorist acts in Egypt, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and despite having been on the State Department’s terrorist watchlist. This, too, was described as a series of “mistakes” after the government was forced to admit that it had occurred – an explanation that the New York Times, which reported this information in a series of articles, seemed to find perfectly satisfactory.

Many, however, find such incompetency and coincidence theories to be simply not credible, preferring instead alternative, oftentimes much more plausible, conspiracy theories.

The Blind Sheikh had also travelled to Peshawar during the mujahedeen effort, and was good friends with Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the CIA’s top asset during the Soviet-Afghan war. He later became the spiritual head of the terrorist group that carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a plot which the FBI had known about in advance through two or more informants.

One of the informants served as a bodyguard for the Blind Sheikh and was made responsible for obtaining materials to make the bomb with. Tape recordings he secretly made of conversations with his FBI handlers reveal that the original sting operation involved a plan to replace a chemical used in making the bomb with an inert simulant that would render it inoperative. But this plan was withdrawn by a supervisor at the FBI and the terrorist cell was allowed to go ahead and make a real bomb – which was then used to blow up the World Trade Center.

Another notable character connected to Al-Kifah training and recruitment efforts for al-Qaeda is Ali Mohammed. He also happened to be an in FBI informant, a CIA asset, and a member of the special forces in the US Army. It is Ali Mohammed whom some suspect of actually being the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing. He was later charged in connection to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but has since seemingly disappeared off the map.

After the 9/11 attacks, the investigation into the financing of the attacks led to Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin. According to Indian officials, a joint investigation with the FBI revealed evidence that it was at the direction of the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, that Omar Sheikh transferred $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in Florida.

Omar Sheikh, a known associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured and imprisoned in India for his role in the kidnapping of American and British nationals in 1994. He was released in 1999 along with Maulana Massod Azhar in exchange for the hostages from Flight 814. According to former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, Omar Sheikh was also an agent of Britain’s spy agency, MI6, for whom he served in operations in the Balkans.

Omar Sheikh’s role in the 9/11 attacks has also been downplayed. Mention of him in the media instead focus on his role as the man responsible for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He is currently being held in Pakistan on charges relating to Pearl’s murder.

After Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the 9/11 attacks became known publicly, Musharraf quietly replaced him and the whole affair was hushed up in the US. When a reporter from a foreign news agency asked then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice whether she was aware of the reports that the ISI chief had financed the hijackers and was in Washington meeting with high level officials at the time of the attacks, she denied having seen “that report” and protested that, “he was certainly not meeting with me.”

Interestingly, the White House website transcript of the press briefing censored the words “ISI chief” from the reporter’s question, despite the words clearly being audible in the video of the briefing.

The 9/11 Commission also acted to whitewash Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the attacks. Despite the question of the ISI chief’s involvement being included on a list of items for the Commission to investigate from families of the victims of the attacks, the Commission’s report made no mention of it, either to confirm or deny the information, which, despite having received zero coverage in the US major media (with the one exception of a citation of a report from the Times of India in a blog on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion website), was widely reported internationally (as well as in US alternative media).

Rather, the 9/11 Commission simply acted as though such reports didn’t exist. Despite Bob Graham, one of the chairs of the earlier Congressional Joint Inquiry, publicly stating that he was surprised by the evidence of foreign government involvement (he added that this information would not be made public for another twenty or thirty years when it would be due for release to the national archives), the 9/11 Commission report arrived at the opposite conclusion, saying there was no evidence of any such involvement and, moreover, that the question of who financed the attacks was “of little practical significance”.

Another former head of the ISI is now being privately accused by the US of involvement with the group responsible for the Mumbai attacks, according to reports citing a document listing former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul and four other former heads of Pakistan’s intelligence agency as being involved in supporting terrorist networks. The individuals named have been recommended to the UN Security Council to be named as international terrorists, according to Pakistan’s The News.

The document has been provided to the Pakistan government and also accuses Gul, who was head of the ISI from 1987-1989, of providing assistance to criminal groups in Kabul, as well as to groups responsible for recruiting and training militants to attack US-led forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban.

Hamid Gul responded to the reports by calling the allegations hilarious. The US denied that it had made any such recommendations to the UN.

But the US has similarly accused the ISI of involvement in the bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul last July. This was unusual not because of the allegation of an ISI connection to terrorism but because it was in such stark contrast with US attempts to publicly portray Pakistan as a staunch ally in its “war on terrorism” when the country was under the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf.

The US attitude toward Pakistan shifted once an elected government came to power that has been more willing to side with the overwhelming belief among the public that it is the “war on terrorism” itself that has exacerbated the problem of extremist militant groups and led to further terrorist attacks within the country, such as the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last year or the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in September. While the world’s attention has been focused on the attacks in Mumbai, a bomb blast in Peshawar last week killed 21 and injured 90.

While the purported US document names Gul and others as terrorist supporters, another report, from Indian intelligence, indicates that the terrorists who carried out the attacks in Mumbai were among 500 trained by instructors from the Pakistan military, according to the Sunday edition of The Times. This training of the 10 known Mumbai terrorists would have taken place prior to their recent preparation for these specific attacks by the LeT training specialist Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

But while Lakhvi, Muzammil, and Hafiz Saeed have continued to be named in connection with last month’s attacks in Mumbai, the name of Dawood Ibrahim seems to be either disappearing altogether or his originally designated role as the accused mastermind of the attacks being credited now instead to Lakhvi in media accounts.

Whether this is a deliberate effort to downplay Ibrahim’s role in the attacks so as not to have to force Pakistan to turn him over because of embarrassing revelations pertaining to the CIA’s involvement with known terrorists and drug traffickers that development could possibly produce isn’t certain. But what is certain is that the CIA has had a long history of involvement with such characters and that the US has a track record of attempting to keep information about the nature of such involvement in the dark or to cover it up once it reaches the light of public scrutiny.

_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

Using false flag operations in order to get two nations at each other’s throats is nothing new for the Jewish state. In 1954 Israel attempted to bomb American interests in Egypt for the purpose of destroying any growing rapprochement between the two countries in what became known as the Lavon Affair. In 1967 Israel attacked and attempted to sink the USS Liberty, again to be blamed on Egypt in order to start a war between the US and the Soviet Union. During the Reagan administration, a Mossad team broadcast messages from a remote location in Libya (termed Operation Trojan Horse) implicating the Arab country in a series of yet-unsolved terror attacks that resulted in the United States bombing the home of Muhammar Kaddafi, Libya’s president. In 1983, Israel learned of and refused to warn the US about a plot to bomb the American embassy in Beirut and its accompanying Marine Barracks that resulted in the deaths of close to 250 Americans. In 1995, immediately following the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Israeli spies and provocateurs working in American media tried pinning the attack on Iraq. And of course, there is the mother of them all, 9/11, the worst terrorist attack to take place on American soil that was used as the pretext for invading and destroying Iraq.

_________________If you want to know who is really in control, ask yourself who you cannot criticise.
"The hunt for 'anti-semites' is a hunt for pockets of resistance to the NWO"-- Israel Shamir
"What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system..." - Heinz "Henry" Kissinger

Arrest Provides More Evidence India, Israel, and the U.S. Behind Mumbai Attacks

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
December 7, 2008

It is becoming increasingly a hard sell to pin the blame for the Mumbai attacks on Pakistan and thus set the stage for an attack on Pakistan after Barack Obama enters the White House in a few weeks. It now appears Indian intelligence played a large part in the terrorist attacks. On Saturday, the Associated Press reported that a "counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission" was arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the gunmen.

Mukhtar Ahmed is an Indian police operative who provided cell phone SIM cards to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan terrorist group blamed for the Mumbai attacks.

The counterinsurgency operative, Mukhtar Ahmed, worked for the police in Indian Kashmir. "The implications of Ahmed's involvement — that Indian agents may have been in touch with the militants and perhaps supplied the SIM cards used in the attacks — added to the growing list of questions over India's ill-trained security forces, which are widely blamed for not thwarting the attacks," reports the Associated Press.

In other words, Indian intelligence had penetrated Lashkar-e-Taiba and ran a false flag operation through the terrorist group, putatively connected to Pakistan's ISI.

Indian police in the Kashmir city of Srinagar told Calcutta police that Ahmed is "our man and it's now up to them how to facilitate his release," said one senior officer speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information. Other police officials in Kashmir supported his account, reports the Associated Press.

Indian intelligence staging false flag terror attacks and blaming them on Muslims is nothing new. On November 23, Andrew Buncombe, writing for the Independent, reported: "India is in something of a state of shock after learning from official sources that its first Hindu terror cell may have carried out a series of deadly bombings that were initially blamed on militant Muslims." In addition to bombing attacks in the Muslim town of Malegaon in the western state of Maharashtra in September, the Hindu terror cells are allegedly responsible for last year's bombing of a cross-border train en route to Pakistan, which killed 68 people, according to Buncombe.

It should be noted that the head of the Maharastrian Anti-Terrorist Squad making the allegations about Hindu false flag terrorism, Hemant Karkare, was assassinated as he led his team into the Hotel Taj Kahal during the Mumbai attacks. "Killed in the line of duty, Hemant Karare was targeted as the man who was an immense problem for the BJP [the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party] because his forthright investigation revealed Hindutva terrorism and he was not about to stop. Clearly this invalidated the BJP campaign rhetoric against Muslim terrorism, but the BJP will still use the emotional fervor of Hindutva to win against the Congress party," writes Allen Heart for OpEdNews.

An exposé carried in a national daily published in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh alleges that Indian intelligence supported extremist Hindutvadis in their murderous Malegaon campaign with the cooperation of Israel's Mossad. "The newspaper writes that relations between Mossad and CIA are world known," notes the Pak Alert Press blog. "The national daily… has exposed that the officials of the national intelligence agencies have categorically stated that American secret service agency, CIA together with Israel's secret organization Mossad, has carried out several secret operation all over Asia," Pak Alert Press reports, translating from the original Urdu.

Indian intelligence, however, is no minor player and its foreign policy objectives currently parallel those of the CIA and Mossad in regard to covert destabilization in South Asia and elsewhere. "RAW [the Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian version of the CIA] , ever since its creation, has always been a vital, though unobtrusive, actor in Indian policy-making apparatus," writes Isha Khan.

Since its creation in 1968, RAW has been "given a virtual carte blanche to conduct destabilization operations in neighboring countries inimical to India to seriously undertook restructuring of its organization accordingly. RAW was given a list of seven countries (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Pakistan and Maldives) whom India considered its principal regional protagonists. It very soon systematically and brilliantly crafted covert operations in all these countries to coerce, destabilize and subvert them in consonance with the foreign policy objectives of the Indian Government."

Specifically, RAW "considers Sindh as Pakistan's soft under-belly. It has, therefore, made it the prime target for sabotage and subversion. RAW has enrolled and extensive network of agents and anti-government elements, and is convinced that with a little push restless Sindh will revolt. Taking fullest advantage of the agitation in Sindh in 1983 and the ethnic riots, which have continued till today, RAW has deeply penetrated and cultivated dissidents and secessionists, thereby creating hard-liners unlikely to allow peace to return to Sindh." Sindh includes Urdu-speaking Muslim refugees who migrated to Pakistan from India upon independence.

It now appears obvious that India's RAW with the help of the CIA and Israel's Mossad created the current situation and have set-up Pakistan's ISI to take the blame for the Mumbai attacks. Senator McCain, flanked by senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, told Ejaz Haider, a senior editor with the Daily Times group, that it could be a "matter of days" before India carried out surgical air strikes if Pakistan did not act on the evidence provided to it on elements linked to the attacks, according to the Daily Star. "If the terrorists succeed in confounding relations between these two great countries, they will achieve their aim. We cannot let that happen," McCain declared.

A conflict between the two nuclear armed nations may very well be the "international crisis, a generated crisis" Joe Biden mentioned in October that will "test" president Barack Obama.

In August, 2007, Obama said "the United States must be willing to strike al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan," a comment that has led more than a few commentators to conclude that the U.S. will attack Pakistan in the coming months. It now appears the false flag Mumbai attacks, described as India's "9/11," will serve as a pretext to get the ball rolling on "surgical strikes" against Pakistan.

Pakistan Asserts "Hoax" War Call Was Real
Press Minister fingers Indian High Commission as source of reports that threatening call was fake
Pakistani officials have asserted that the so called "hoax" phone call to its President Zardari on November 28, which threatened war in response to the Mumbai attacks, was in fact real and that Indian High Commission officials have since circulated a report in the media suggesting it was false.
http://www.infowars.net/articles/december2008/081208Hoaxcall.htm

SRINAGAR, India – One of the two Indian men arrested for illegally buying mobile phone cards used by the gunmen in the Mumbai attacks was a counterinsurgency police officer who may have been on an undercover mission, security officials said Saturday, demanding his release.

The arrests, announced in the eastern city of Calcutta, were the first since the bloody siege ended. But what was touted as a rare success for India's beleaguered law enforcement agencies, quickly turned sour as police in two Indian regions squared off against one another.

Senior police officers in Indian Kashmir, which has been at the heart of tensions between India and Pakistan, demanded the release of the officer, Mukhtar Ahmed, saying he was one of their own and had been involved in infiltrating Kashmiri militant groups.

Indian authorities believe the banned Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has links to Kashmir, trained the gunmen and plotted the attacks that left 171 people dead after a three-day rampage through Mumbai that began Nov. 26.

The implications of Ahmed's involvement — that Indian agents may have been in touch with the militants and perhaps supplied the SIM cards used in the attacks — added to the growing list of questions over India's ill-trained security forces, which are widely blamed for not thwarting the attacks.

Earlier Saturday, Calcutta police announced the arrests of Ahmed and Tauseef Rahman, who allegedly bought SIM cards by using fake documents, including identification cards of dead people. The cards allow users switch their cellular service to phones other than their own.

Rahman, of West Bengal state, later sold them to Ahmed, said Rajeev Kumar a senior Calcutta police officer.

Both men were arrested Friday and charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy, Kumar said, adding that police were still investigating how the 10 gunmen obtained the SIM cards.

But the announcement had police in Srinagar, the main city in Indian-controlled Kashmir, fuming.

We have told Calcutta police that Ahmed is "our man and it's now up to them how to facilitate his release," said one senior officer speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information. Other police officials in Kashmir supported his account.

The officer said Ahmed was a Special Police Officer, part of a semiofficial counterinsurgency network whose members are usually drawn from former militants. The force is run on a special funding from the federal Ministry of Home Affairs.

"Sometimes we use our men engaged in counterinsurgency ops to provide SIM cards to the (militant) outfits so that we track their plans down," said the officer.

Police said Ahmed was recruited to the force after his brother was killed five years ago, allegedly by Lashkar-e-Taiba militants for being a police informer.

About a dozen Islamic militant groups have been fighting in Kashmir since 1989, seeking independence from mainly Hindu India or a union with Muslim-majority Pakistan.

India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over the Himalayan region, which is divided between them and claimed by both in its entirety.

The Calcutta police denied the claims from Srinagar. "This is not true," said Kumar.

The bungling and miscommunications among India's many security services comes as police said they were re-examining another suspected Lashkar militant who was arrested nine months before the attacks carrying hand-drawn sketches of Mumbai hotels, the train terminal and other targeted sites.

Rakesh Maria, a senior Mumbai police officer, said the man, Faheem Ansari, was being transported to Mumbai from northern India where he has been in custody for further questioning, hoping he could shed more light on the attacks.

Maria said there was a definite connection between Ansari and the Mumbai attacks. "Ansari was trained by Lashkar and sent to do reconnaissance," he said.

And a day after India's top law enforcement official apologized for security "lapses" that allowed the gunmen to rampage through Mumbai, there were new embarrassments — this time with holes in the prime minister's security.

Police preparing for a visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh near Calcutta hired high-school children for the equivalent of $2.50 each to sit in trees for the day and look out for suspicious people.

Local police chief L.N. Meena defended using children in the prime minister's security detail, saying there were too many trees in the area and not enough policemen.

"The area is full of trees, so to check them to see if there were any anti-social elements or anyone making mischief, we employed the youths," he said.

Television footage showed dozens of the youngsters perched in trees, with yellow paper badges that read "security pass" pinned on their chests.

Meanwhile police continued the interrogation of the lone surviving gunman from the Mumbai attacks, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 21, who revealed that the gunmen had detailed pictures of the locations, Maria said.

"They were pretty elaborate photographs," he said, adding that they had also used maps from Google to study the targets.

Kasab has told interrogators he had been sent by Lashkar and identified two of the plot's masterminds as being involved, two Indian government officials familiar with the inquiry said. Police had earlier identified the prisoner as Ajmal Amir Kasab.

Lashkar changed its name to Jamaat-ud-Dawa after it was banned in 2002 amid U.S. pressure, according to the U.S. State Department. The U.S. lists both groups as terrorist organizations.

Kasab told police that a senior Lashkar leader, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the group's operations chief, recruited him for the attack, and that the assailants called another senior leader, Yusuf Muzammil, on a satellite phone before the attacks.

In Pakistan, the Interior Ministry chief told reporters he had no immediate information on Lakhvi or Muzammil.

According to the U.S., Lakhvi has directed Lashkar operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and Southeast Asia, training members to carry out suicide bombings and attack populated areas. In 2004, he allegedly sent operatives and funds to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.

____

Associated Press writers Ravi Nessman, Muneeza Naqvi and Ramola Talwar Badam in Mumbai, Sam Dolnick and Ashok Sharma in New Delhi, and Manik Banerjee in Calcutta contributed to this report.

_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

As a result of the phone call, Pakistan scrambled fighter jets–fully armed–and sent them screaming towards the Indian border. The Pakistani Prime Minister was contacted and ordered to report in the middle of the night. The Foreign Minister was shuffled onto a plane and flown to Islamabad. Pakistan was put on a war footing and all the major players needed for fighting a war were assembled in quick order. Preparations were made to divert thousands of troops from the western border with Afghanistan where Pakistan is currently assisting NATO forces in fighting terrorists.

In sum, for 24 hours the two nuclear powers were a hair’s trigger away from war. The United States–having very close (and increasingly closer) ties to India was contacted by Zardari who informed the State Department about the increasingly dangerous situation. Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice contacted her Indian counterpart who informed her that no such call had been made.

For her part, Pakistan maintains that indeed the call originated from a recognized phone number within the Indian government’s Foreign Ministry, and while some protocols were not followed in terms of verification that it had all the earmarking of being “the real deal”.

Some will no doubt simply shrug this off as a prank call made by someone from within the Indian government angry at the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. However, there are other more troubling explanations that must be considered as well, one of which is that the call was a deliberate attempt on the part of certain unseen players in the whole scenario who want to see a war started between the two nations, and as it turns out, surprise, surprise, the most likely culprit for such an act happens to be Israel.

Using false flag operations in order to get two nations at each other’s throats is nothing new for the Jewish state. In 1954 Israel attempted to bomb American interests in Egypt for the purpose of destroying any growing rapprochement between the two countries in what became known as the Lavon Affair. In 1967 Israel attacked and attempted to sink the USS Liberty, again to be blamed on Egypt in order to start a war between the US and the Soviet Union. During the Reagan administration, a Mossad team broadcast messages from a remote location in Libya (termed Operation Trojan Horse) implicating the Arab country in a series of yet-unsolved terror attacks that resulted in the United States bombing the home of Muhammar Kaddafi, Libya’s president. In 1983, Israel learned of and refused to warn the US about a plot to bomb the American embassy in Beirut and its accompanying Marine Barracks that resulted in the deaths of close to 250 Americans. In 1995, immediately following the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Israeli spies and provocateurs working in American media tried pinning the attack on Iraq. And of course, there is the mother of them all, 9/11, the worst terrorist attack to take place on American soil that was used as the pretext for invading and destroying Iraq.

Therefore, Israel–with very close ties to India–has everything to gain by starting a war between the for-the-most-part Hindu nation of over a billion people and its Muslim neighbor to the west that has always been a thorn in the side of the Jewish state’s agenda.

Besides anomalies surrounding the attacks themselves (such as the blond haired/blue eyed assassins as they were described by witnesses) that resulted in close to 200 deaths, there are other perfectly reasonable reasons to assume Israel has her bloody hand in the entire event for her own far-reaching agenda. Given that India is one of Israel’s biggest buyers of her armaments, a sustained war between Pakistan and India would be a boon for the Jewish state, both in terms of sales and product testing. The weapons systems Israel is planning to use in her much-dreamed of war against Iran would get their “dry run” on the battlefield between India and Pakistan.

Next of course is the “clash of civilizations” Israel has worked tirelessly to create, a situation in which the rest of the world (and in particular, the Muslim Middle East and Christian West) wipes each other out, leaving the Jewish state unimpeded in imposing her “chosen people’ agenda upon what is left of humanity. What was (the day before the Mumbai attacks) a war between a billion Muslims and a billion Christians has now been expanded to include billion Hindus, the total sum of which encompasses over half the world’s population.

As far as the mechanics of the operation go, again Israel is the most likely of all the players in terms of means. In his most recent book “The Shadow Factory” former National Security Officer James Bamford details the depth to which the Jewish state has invested herself in the telecommunications industry and the capacity she now possesses in tapping into any phone line or internet connection worldwide. Through companies such as Verint and Narus, a redline with Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv now exists for listening in on every conversation throughout the entire world, which must include players as important to the survival of the Jewish state as India and Pakistan. Therefore, placing a call to the office of the Pakistani president and manipulating the logarithms of the telecommunication software to have it appear the call originated from within the Indian Ministry of Foreign affairs would be as easy to achieve as any of the special effects regularly seen in any production originating out of Jewish Hollywood.

It is highly likely, given the events taking place at that time, that had Zardari not contacted Sec of State Rice the world would be a much different and more dangerous place than it already is. Having Pakistani jets screaming towards India, a nation that had just suffered a series of deadly attacks by terrorists said to be of Pakistani origin would have resulted in India assuming another attack was underway, resulting in India “jumping the gun” so to speak, sending her jets and troops westward towards Pakistan with guns a-blazing. In the hysteria and confusion of it all, the situation between the two countries (that have always been a hair trigger away from war with each other anyway) would have escalated and gotten out of control in no time. Israel for her part would no doubt take advantage of the event to attack Iran while the attention of her military, political and intelligence apparatus was looking at and concentrating on events taking place eastward. Israel would then have the war she desperately needs against her ancient nemesis Persia in order to re-consolidate the social cohesion necessary to hold the Zionist state together in what is an organically fractured Jewish society.

Lashkar-e-Taiba group denies terror plot 15 Dec 2008 The Lashkar-e-Taiba has denied British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's charge that it was responsible for the Mumbai terror attack and said the lone terrorist captured alive was not a member of its outfit. A press release issued by its spokesperson Dr. Abdullah Ghaznavi said the British Prime Minister has levelled an allegation against the group without any proof.
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/index.php?sid=442234

Pakistan says Indian warplanes violated airspace 14 Dec 2008 Pakistan said on Saturday that Indian warplanes had violated its airspace but said this was "inadvertent" and there was no cause for alarm about an escalation of tension between the nuclear-armed neighbours. In New Delhi, an Indian Defence Ministry spokesman said he had no information on the reported incursion.
http://in.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idINLD30917820081213_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

Pakistan tells UK to stay out of terror investigation 16 Dec 2008 A request to Pakistan that UK police be allowed to question Pakistani suspects in the Mumbai attack has been rejected. Prime Minister Gordon Brown had asked for UK detectives to be given access to Pakistan’s investigations over the likely involvement of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group. But Mr Brown's Pakistani counterpart, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said: "It is our country and our laws will be implemented. We'll follow our laws."
...
During his visit to Pakistan, Mr Brown unveiled a $9 million deal with Pakistan, which he called the most comprehensive anti-terrorist program between the UK and another country.
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/index.php?sid=442736

Mumbai attacks a diversion tactic: analyst --Goal: Relieve military pressure on Afghan border 17 Dec 2008 The Mumbai terror attacks are directly linked to the military situation along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, says Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani writer and security analyst . In an interview with The Hindu, Mr. Rashid said groups behind the attacks wanted to relieve the pressure that was being mounted on them by the Pakistani Army along the western border with Afghanistan
http://www.hindu.com/2008/12/17/stories/2008121752351700.htm_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

Lawyer Claims Karkare Shot By Hindutva Terrorists
New Delhi, India, 16 December 2008 (Mail Today) - A Mumbai-based lawyer has moved the Bombay High Court, seeking an independent investigation into the circumstances under which Maharashtra Anti- Terrorism Squad [ATS police] chief Hemant Karkare was killed.
Amin Solkar filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) on December 11 [2008], mainly because Karkare was investigating the countrywide Hindutva terror network. The PIL has asked the Court to appoint a special investigating team under its supervision.
Karkare had unearthed an alleged Hindutva terror plot while probing the Malegaon blasts case. The Muslims in Malegaon have always claimed Karkare was killed by Hindutva militants and not by [Ajmal] Qasab.
Solkar’s petition is expected to be heard on Thursday. The PIL wants former CM [Chief Minister] of Maharashtra, Vilasrao Deshmukh, to file an affidavit disclosing the names of [Indian-Hindu] political leaders who wanted Karkare out of the ATS.
Former [Maharashtra] Revenue Minister Narayan Rane will also have some explanations to do. “A week after 26/11 [2008], he said some [Indian- Hindu] politicians had provided logistical and financial support for the [Mumbai] attack,” claimed Solkar.

PIL Asks Rane to Expose Politicians Helping Terrorists
Mumbai, India, 12 December 2008 (PTI) - A PIL [Public Interest Litigation] filed in the Bombay High Court has demanded that suspended [Indian National] Congress [INC] leader Narayan Rane be asked to reveal names of the [Indian-Hindu] politicians who were allegedly in cahoots with terrorists.
Rane, licking his wounds after being not given the [Maharashtra] Chief Minister’s post following Vilasrao Deshmukh’s resignation, had alleged on December 6 [2008] that terrorists were getting logistical [and financial] support from [Indian-Hindu] politicians.
“The terrorists are provided logistical and financial support from such [Indian-Hindu] politicians,” he had charged but refused to substantiate his allegation and to clarify whether he was referring to any Congress politician.
Avisha Kulkarni, a social activist, has filed a petition, saying Rane must be made to reveal the names of these [Indian-Hindu] politicians.
Rane, who has been a [Maharashtra] Chief Minister when he was in [Indian-Hindu terrorist] Shiv Sena, and a [Maharashtra] Revenue Minister after he joined Congress, is “guilty of suppression of information,” Kulkarni’s petition says, seeking action against him.
Rane as well as the state police have been made respondents in the PIL. Police must question Rane, it says..............

NEW DELHI: Indian Minority Affairs Minister Abdul Rahman Antulay has caused a storm in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday and Thursday, suggesting that the killing of Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare in Mumbai during last month’s terror attacks was a conspiracy. The minister said he was killed due to his leading role in the investigations of the 2006 Malegaon bombings that killed eight people outside a mosque and have been blamed on Hindu nationalists. “Anyone trying to go to the roots of terror has always been a target,” he said, calling for a separate inquiry into Karkare’s death.

“There is more than what meets the eye,” he said, adding that the top official went to Cama Hospital instead of the Taj and Oberoi hotels, and was wearing a ‘substandard’ bulletproof vest. Creating five minutes of pandemonium as Antulay sat quietly, opposition legislators said they were not satisfied with his clarification in the House the previous day that he did doubt the terrorists had killed Karkare. Speaker Somnath Chatterjee tried in vain to pacify the agitated legislators, who continued to protest even after Parliamentary Affairs Minister Vyalar Ravi intervened and assured them the government would look into the matter. Congress: A red-faced Congress swiftly dissociated itself from the minister. ......

Smells to me like the Right in India.
Others?
Carrying this important article in full

The monster in the mirror

The Mumbai attacks have been dubbed 'India's 9/11', and there are calls for a 9/11-style response, including an attack on Pakistan. Instead, the country must fight terrorism with justice, or face civil war

We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching "India's 9/11". Like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we're expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it's all been said and done before.

As tension in the region builds, US Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that if it didn't act fast to arrest the "Bad Guys" he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on "terrorist camps" in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India's 9/11.

But November isn't September, 2008 isn't 2001, Pakistan isn't Afghanistan and India isn't America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions.

It's odd how in the last week of November thousands of people in Kashmir supervised by thousands of Indian troops lined up to cast their vote, while the richest quarters of India's richest city ended up looking like war-torn Kupwara – one of Kashmir's most ravaged districts.

The Mumbai attacks are only the most recent of a spate of terrorist attacks on Indian towns and cities this year. Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Guwahati, Jaipur and Malegaon have all seen serial bomb blasts in which hundreds of ordinary people have been killed and wounded. If the police are right about the people they have arrested as suspects, both Hindu and Muslim, all Indian nationals, it obviously indicates that something's going very badly wrong in this country.

If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre.

We're told one of these hotels is an icon of the city of Mumbai. That's absolutely true. It's an icon of the easy, obscene injustice that ordinary Indians endure every day. On a day when the newspapers were full of moving obituaries by beautiful people about the hotel rooms they had stayed in, the gourmet restaurants they loved (ironically one was called Kandahar), and the staff who served them, a small box on the top left-hand corner in the inner pages of a national newspaper (sponsored by a pizza company I think) said "Hungry, kya?" (Hungry eh?). It then, with the best of intentions I'm sure, informed its readers that on the international hunger index, India ranked below Sudan and Somalia. But of course this isn't that war. That one's still being fought in the Dalit bastis of our villages, on the banks of the Narmada and the Koel Karo rivers; in the rubber estate in Chengara; in the villages of Nandigram, Singur, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Lalgarh in West Bengal and the slums and shantytowns of our gigantic cities.

That war isn't on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is.

There is a fierce, unforgiving fault-line that runs through the contemporary discourse on terrorism. On one side (let's call it Side A) are those who see terrorism, especially "Islamist" terrorism, as a hateful, insane scourge that spins on its own axis, in its own orbit and has nothing to do with the world around it, nothing to do with history, geography or economics. Therefore, Side A says, to try and place it in a political context, or even try to understand it, amounts to justifying it and is a crime in itself.

Side B believes that though nothing can ever excuse or justify terrorism, it exists in a particular time, place and political context, and to refuse to see that will only aggravate the problem and put more and more people in harm's way. Which is a crime in itself.

The sayings of Hafiz Saeed, who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) in 1990 and who belongs to the hardline Salafi tradition of Islam, certainly bolsters the case of Side A. Hafiz Saeed approves of suicide bombing, hates Jews, Shias and Democracy and believes that jihad should be waged until Islam, his Islam, rules the world. Among the things he said are: "There cannot be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy."

And: "India has shown us this path. We would like to give India a tit-for-tat response and reciprocate in the same way by killing the Hindus, just like it is killing the Muslims in Kashmir."

But where would Side A accommodate the sayings of Babu Bajrangi of Ahmedabad, India, who sees himself as a democrat, not a terrorist? He was one of the major lynchpins of the 2002 Gujarat genocide and has said (on camera): "We didn't spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire … we hacked, burned, set on fire … we believe in setting them on fire because these b****** don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it … I have just one last wish … let me be sentenced to death … I don't care if I'm hanged ... just give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs [seven or eight hundred thousand] of these people stay ... I will finish them off … let a few more of them die ... at least 25,000 to 50,000 should die."

And where, in Side A's scheme of things, would we place the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh bible, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined by MS Golwalkar, who became head of the RSS in 1944. It says: "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening."
Or: "To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here ... a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."

(Of course Muslims are not the only people in the gun sights of the Hindu right. Dalits have been consistently targeted. Recently in Kandhamal in Orissa, Christians were the target of two and a half months of violence which left more than 40 dead. Forty thousand people have been driven from their homes, half of who now live in refugee camps.)

All these years Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaat-ud Daawa, which many believe is a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He continues to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jehad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11 the UN imposed sanctions on the Jammat-ud-Daawa. The Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and lives the life of a respectable man in Gujarat. A couple of years after the genocide he left the VHP to join the Shiv Sena. Narendra Modi, Bajrangi's former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat. So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India's biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata.

Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, recently said: "Modi is God." The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted. The RSS has 45,000 branches, its own range of charities and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister AB Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition LK Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats and police and intelligence officers.

If that's not enough to complicate our picture of secular democracy, we should place on record that there are plenty of Muslim organisations within India preaching their own narrow bigotry.

So, on balance, if I had to choose between Side A and Side B, I'd pick Side B. We need context. Always.

In this nuclear subcontinent that context is partition. The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain's final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Each of those people carries and passes down a story of unimaginable pain, hate, horror but yearning too. That wound, those torn but still unsevered muscles, that blood and those splintered bones still lock us together in a close embrace of hatred, terrifying familiarity but also love. It has left Kashmir trapped in a nightmare from which it can't seem to emerge, a nightmare that has claimed more than 60,000 lives. Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, became an Islamic Republic, and then, very quickly a corrupt, violent military state, openly intolerant of other faiths. India on the other hand declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi's predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India's bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born.

By 1990 they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992 Hindu mobs exhorted by LK Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it. By 1998 the BJP was in power at the centre. The US war on terror put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy. This happened at a time when India had opened its huge market to international finance and it was in the interests of international corporations and the media houses they owned to project it as a country that could do no wrong. That gave Hindu nationalists all the impetus and the impunity they needed.

This, then, is the larger historical context of terrorism in the subcontinent and of the Mumbai attacks. It shouldn't surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and LK Advani of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh is from Sindh (Pakistan).

In much the same way as it did after the 2001 parliament attack, the 2002 burning of the Sabarmati Express and the 2007 bombing of the Samjhauta Express, the government of India announced that it has "incontrovertible" evidence that the Lashkar-e-Taiba backed by Pakistan's ISI was behind the Mumbai strikes. The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies the Lashkar operates in India through an organisation called the Indian Mujahideen. Two Indian nationals, Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a Special Police Officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Kolkata in West Bengal, have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks.

So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy. Almost always, when these stories unspool, they reveal a complicated global network of foot soldiers, trainers, recruiters, middlemen and undercover intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives working not just on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, but in several countries simultaneously. In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible.

In circumstances like these, air strikes to "take out" terrorist camps may take out the camps, but certainly will not "take out" the terrorists. Neither will war. (Also, in our bid for the moral high ground, let's try not to forget that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE of neighbouring Sri Lanka, one of the world's most deadly terrorist groups, were trained by the Indian army.)

Thanks largely to the part it was forced to play as America's ally first in its war in support of the Afghan Islamists and then in its war against them, Pakistan, whose territory is reeling under these contradictions, is careening towards civil war. As recruiting agents for America's jihad against the Soviet Union, it was the job of the Pakistan army and the ISI to nurture and channel funds to Islamic fundamentalist organizations. Having wired up these Frankensteins and released them into the world, the US expected it could rein them in like pet mastiffs whenever it wanted to.

Certainly it did not expect them to come calling in heart of the Homeland on September 11. So once again, Afghanistan had to be violently remade. Now the debris of a re-ravaged Afghanistan has washed up on Pakistan's borders. Nobody, least of all the Pakistan government, denies that it is presiding over a country that is threatening to implode. The terrorist training camps, the fire-breathing mullahs and the maniacs who believe that Islam will, or should, rule the world is mostly the detritus of two Afghan wars. Their ire rains down on the Pakistan government and Pakistani civilians as much, if not more than it does on India.

If at this point India decides to go to war perhaps the descent of the whole region into chaos will be complete. The debris of a bankrupt, destroyed Pakistan will wash up on India's shores, endangering us as never before. If Pakistan collapses, we can look forward to having millions of "non-state actors" with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal as neighbours. It's hard to understand why those who steer India's ship are so keen to replicate Pakistan's mistakes and call damnation upon this country by inviting the United States to further meddle clumsily and dangerously in our extremely complicated affairs. A superpower never has allies. It only has agents.

On the plus side, the advantage of going to war is that it's the best way for India to avoid facing up to the serious trouble building on our home front. The Mumbai attacks were broadcast live (and exclusive!) on all or most of our 67 24-hour news channels and god knows how many international ones. TV anchors in their studios and journalists at "ground zero" kept up an endless stream of excited commentary. Over three days and three nights we watched in disbelief as a small group of very young men armed with guns and gadgets exposed the powerlessness of the police, the elite National Security Guard and the marine commandos of this supposedly mighty, nuclear-powered nation.

While they did this they indiscriminately massacred unarmed people, in railway stations, hospitals and luxury hotels, unmindful of their class, caste, religion or nationality. (Part of the helplessness of the security forces had to do with having to worry about hostages. In other situations, in Kashmir for example, their tactics are not so sensitive. Whole buildings are blown up. Human shields are used. The U.S and Israeli armies don't hesitate to send cruise missiles into buildings and drop daisy cutters on wedding parties in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.) But this was different. And it was on TV.

The boy-terrorists' nonchalant willingness to kill – and be killed – mesmerised their international audience. They delivered something different from the usual diet of suicide bombings and missile attacks that people have grown inured to on the news. Here was something new. Die Hard 25. The gruesome performance went on and on. TV ratings soared. Ask any television magnate or corporate advertiser who measures broadcast time in seconds, not minutes, what that's worth.

Eventually the killers died and died hard, all but one. (Perhaps, in the chaos, some escaped. We may never know.) Throughout the standoff the terrorists made no demands and expressed no desire to negotiate. Their purpose was to kill people and inflict as much damage as they could before they were killed themselves. They left us completely bewildered. When we say "nothing can justify terrorism", what most of us mean is that nothing can justify the taking of human life. We say this because we respect life, because we think it's precious. So what are we to make of those who care nothing for life, not even their own? The truth is that we have no idea what to make of them, because we can sense that even before they've died, they've journeyed to another world where we cannot reach them.

One TV channel (India TV) broadcast a phone conversation with one of the attackers, who called himself Imran Babar. I cannot vouch for the veracity of the conversation, but the things he talked about were the things contained in the "terror emails" that were sent out before several other bomb attacks in India. Things we don't want to talk about any more: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the genocidal slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the brutal repression in Kashmir. "You're surrounded," the anchor told him. "You are definitely going to die. Why don't you surrender?"

"We die every day," he replied in a strange, mechanical way. "It's better to live one day as a lion and then die this way." He didn't seem to want to change the world. He just seemed to want to take it down with him.

If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn't it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for? Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don't figure in their calculations except as collateral damage. It has always been a part of and often even the aim of terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden faultlines. The blood of "martyrs" irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project. A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theatre, spectacle and symbolism, and today, the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV. Even as the attack was being condemned by TV anchors, the effectiveness of the terror strikes were being magnified a thousandfold by TV broadcasts.

Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Instead we had retired diplomats and strategic experts debate the pros and cons of a war against Pakistan. We had the rich threatening not to pay their taxes unless their security was guaranteed (is it alright for the poor to remain unprotected?). We had people suggest that the government step down and each state in India be handed over to a separate corporation. We had the death of former prime minster VP Singh, the hero of Dalits and lower castes and villain of Upper caste Hindus pass without a mention.

We had Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City and co-writer of the Bollywood film Mission Kashmir, give us his version of George Bush's famous "Why they hate us" speech. His analysis of why religious bigots, both Hindu and Muslim hate Mumbai: "Perhaps because Mumbai stands for lucre, profane dreams and an indiscriminate openness." His prescription: "The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever." Didn't George Bush ask Americans to go out and shop after 9/11? Ah yes. 9/11, the day we can't seem to get away from.

Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and leftwing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army and virtually asking for a police state. It isn't surprising that those who have grown plump on the pickings of democracy (such as it is) should now be calling for a police state. The era of "pickings" is long gone. We're now in the era of Grabbing by Force, and democracy has a terrible habit of getting in the way.

Dangerous, stupid television flashcards like the Police are Good Politicians are Bad/Chief Executives are Good Chief Ministers are Bad/Army is Good Government is Bad/ India is Good Pakistan is Bad are being bandied about by TV channels that have already whipped their viewers into a state of almost uncontrollable hysteria.

Tragically, this regression into intellectual infancy comes at a time when people in India were beginning to see that in the business of terrorism, victims and perpetrators sometimes exchange roles. It's an understanding that the people of Kashmir, given their dreadful experiences of the last 20 years, have honed to an exquisite art. On the mainland we're still learning. (If Kashmir won't willingly integrate into India, it's beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegrate into Kashmir.)

It was after the 2001 parliament attack that the first serious questions began to be raised. A campaign by a group of lawyers and activists exposed how innocent people had been framed by the police and the press, how evidence was fabricated, how witnesses lied, how due process had been criminally violated at every stage of the investigation. Eventually the courts acquitted two out of the four accused, including SAR Geelani, the man whom the police claimed was the mastermind of the operation. A third, Showkat Guru, was acquitted of all the charges brought against him but was then convicted for a fresh, comparatively minor offence. The supreme court upheld the death sentence of another of the accused, Mohammad Afzal. In its judgment the court acknowledged there was no proof that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group, but went on to say, quite shockingly, "The collective conscience of the society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender." Even today we don't really know who the terrorists that attacked the Indian parliament were and who they worked for.

More recently, on September 19 this year, we had the controversial "encounter" at Batla House in Jamia Nagar, Delhi, where the Special Cell of the Delhi police gunned down two Muslim students in their rented flat under seriously questionable circumstances, claiming that they were responsible for serial bombings in Delhi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad in 2008. An assistant commissioner of Police, Mohan Chand Sharma, who played a key role in the parliament attack investigation, lost his life as well. He was one of India's many "encounter specialists" known and rewarded for having summarily executed several "terrorists". There was an outcry against the Special Cell from a spectrum of people, ranging from eyewitnesses in the local community to senior Congress Party leaders, students, journalists, lawyers, academics and activists all of whom demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. In response, the BJP and LK Advani lauded Mohan Chand Sharma as a "Braveheart" and launched a concerted campaign in which they targeted those who had dared to question the integrity of the police, saying it was "suicidal" and calling them "anti-national". Of course there has been no inquiry.

Only days after the Batla House event, another story about "terrorists" surfaced in the news. In a report submitted to a sessions court, the CBI said that a team from Delhi's Special Cell (the same team that led the Batla House encounter, including Mohan Chand Sharma) had abducted two innocent men, Irshad Ali and Moarif Qamar, in December 2005, planted 2kg of RDX and two pistols on them and then arrested them as "terrorists" who belonged to Al Badr (which operates out of Kashmir). Ali and Qamar who have spent years in jail, are only two examples out of hundreds of Muslims who have been similarly jailed, tortured and even killed on false charges.

This pattern changed in October 2008 when Maharashtra's Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) that was investigating the September 2008 Malegaon blasts arrested a Hindu preacher Sadhvi Pragya, a self-styled God man Swami Dayanand Pande and Lt Col Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian Army. All the arrested belong to Hindu Nationalist organizations including a Hindu Supremacist group called Abhinav Bharat. The Shiv Sena, the BJP and the RSS condemned the Maharashtra ATS, and vilified its chief, Hemant Karkare, claiming he was part of a political conspiracy and declaring that "Hindus could not be terrorists". LK Advani changed his mind about his policy on the police and made rabble rousing speeches to huge gatherings in which he denounced the ATS for daring to cast aspersions on holy men and women.

On the November 25 newspapers reported that the ATS was investigating the high profile VHP Chief Pravin Togadia's possible role in the Malegaon blasts. The next day, in an extraordinary twist of fate, Hemant Karkare was killed in the Mumbai Attacks. The chances are that the new chief whoever he is, will find it hard to withstand the political pressure that is bound to be brought on him over the Malegaon investigation.

While the Sangh Parivar does not seem to have come to a final decision over whether or not it is anti-national and suicidal to question the police, Arnab Goswami, anchorperson of Times Now television, has stepped up to the plate. He has taken to naming, demonising and openly heckling people who have dared to question the integrity of the police and armed forces. My name and the name of the well-known lawyer Prashant Bhushan have come up several times. At one point, while interviewing a former police officer, Arnab Goswami turned to camera: "Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan," he said, "I hope you are watching this. We think you are disgusting." For a TV anchor to do this in an atmosphere as charged and as frenzied as the one that prevails today, amounts to incitement as well as threat, and would probably in different circumstances have cost a journalist his or her job.

So according to a man aspiring to be the next prime minister of India, and another who is the public face of a mainstream TV channel, citizens have no right to raise questions about the police. This in a country with a shadowy history of suspicious terror attacks, murky investigations, and fake "encounters". This in a country that boasts of the highest number of custodial deaths in the world and yet refuses to ratify the International Covenant on Torture. A country where the ones who make it to torture chambers are the lucky ones because at least they've escaped being "encountered" by our Encounter Specialists. A country where the line between the Underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist.

How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them? There are those who point out that US strategy has been successful inasmuch as the United States has not suffered a major attack on its home ground since 9/11. However, some would say that what America is suffering now is far worse. If the idea behind the 9/11 terror attacks was to goad America into showing its true colors, what greater success could the terrorists have asked for? The US army is bogged down in two unwinnable wars, which have made the United States the most hated country in the world. Those wars have contributed greatly to the unraveling of the American economy and who knows, perhaps eventually the American empire. (Could it be that battered, bombed Afghanistan, the graveyard of the Soviet Union, will be the undoing of this one too?) Hundreds of thousands people including thousands of American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frequency of terrorist strikes on U.S allies/agents (including India) and U.S interests in the rest of the world has increased dramatically since 9/11. George Bush, the man who led the US response to 9/11 is a despised figure not just internationally, but also by his own people. Who can possibly claim that the United States is winning the war on terror?

Homeland Security has cost the US government billions of dollars. Few countries, certainly not India, can afford that sort of price tag. But even if we could, the fact is that this vast homeland of ours cannot be secured or policed in the way the United States has been. It's not that kind of homeland. We have a hostile nuclear weapons state that is slowly spinning out of control as a neighbour, we have a military occupation in Kashmir and a shamefully persecuted, impoverished minority of more than 150 million Muslims who are being targeted as a community and pushed to the wall, whose young see no justice on the horizon, and who, were they to totally lose hope and radicalise, end up as a threat not just to India, but to the whole world. If ten men can hold off the NSG commandos, and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?

Nor for that matter will any other quick fix. Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they're for people that governments don't like. That's why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They're just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go. Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It's what they want.

What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.

IAF plans to hit targets in 24 hours
Source: SPECIAL REPORT submitted 20 hours 8 minutes ago
Meanwhile, the ex-Army Chief of Pakistan General (R) Aslam Baig has said that US General Mullen is pressing our authorities to allow India to hit certain targets, keeping silent and indifferent to the situation as they have been doing in case of US attacks, which he believes, will cool down India and diffuse tensions between the two countries.

I don’t think that conscientious Pakistani nation and brave armed forces of Pakistan will accept such a situation. This will be shameful and render Pakistan submission to India,” the retired General said. While talking to the Nawa-i-Waqt/The Nation.

He further said that the nation would lose its confidence in their government and the armed forces for ever and the nation would stand no where, should such a situation prevailed. He called upon the rulers to explain their position in this regard.

He said that the US was after ridiculing the sovereignty of Pakistan only to please India and Mullen had come with a dangerous message.

Pakistan military on 'red alert' 23 Dec 2008 Pakistan's media is reporting that the country's military is on high alert over a possible strike by India. Monday's reports come after a ratcheting up of tension between the two countries following attacks in Mumbai last month which killed 163 people.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2008/12/20081222102547699277.ht ml

Suspected US drones kill 7 [civilians] in Pakistan - agents 22 Dec 2008 Suspected U.S. drones fired two missiles into Pakistan's South Waziristan region on the Afghan border on Monday, killing seven people [revised to eight], intelligence agency officials and residents said. One missile hit a vehicle in a village near Wana, the main town in the region, killing four people, while three people were killed in another strike in a nearby village, two Pakistani intelligence agency officials said. "Tribesmen opened fire on the drones after the attacks," a resident of Wana told Reuters by telephone.
http://www.reuters.com/article/featuredCrisis/idUSISL378747_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

newswires around the world are buzzing with this bs story today - no doubt editors will be instructing their subs to put the 'coincidence theory' on the front pages too

‘No conspiracy in the killing of ATS officers’
New Delhi Bureau

Antulay: my doubts now cleared
NEW DELHI: The Central government on Tuesday rejected the suggestion of a conspiracy in the killing of three senior officers of Maharashtra’s Anti-Terror Squad (ATS), including its head Hemant Karkare. It informed Parliament that their death was “tragically fortuitous.”

However, the government’s attempt to cap the controversy sparked by Minister for Minority Affairs A. R. Antulay’s remarks did not succeed. The Opposition was dissatisfied with the statement and continued to disrupt Parliament all day........

A war between India and Pakistan is unthinkable, believes Shah Zaman Khan ,Minister, Press, at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi.

The war hysteria in both nations is being fuelled by “one common enemy that does not want India and Pakistan to be friends,” the senior Pakistani diplomat asserts. “What we have seen in Mumbai is altogether a third party conspiracy.”

...What we have seen in Mumbai is altogether a third party conspiracy. There is one common enemy that does not want India and Pakistan to be friends. It is very necessary to remove that common enemy and that is possible only when we have mutual cooperation and trust and India and Pakistan help each other in eradicating this common enemy. Let the two countries not exploit each other’s weaknesses rather help each other in these trying conditions.

All this is the result of an international conspiracy?

Yes, it is all their game and both of us are suffering. It is high time that both India and Pakistan start accepting the reality and unite against international conspiracies. Let’s not be exploited by others. We must not allow ourselves to play in the hands of others.

Could you elaborate?

In order to promote their arms and ammunition, some powers are trying to ignite war between India and Pakistan. The arms lobby is forcing these powers to go with the “divide and rule” policy. This will stop only when India and Pakistan start realising that they are 'lost' brothers. The majority of us love each other. Only few rotten fish cannot continue to pollute the entire pond...! We must fight the terror collectively, without falling prey to the negative elements, which want both India and Pakistan to be broken into pieces. We all want peace and silence. The whole region is sick of the bloodshed and mayhem.

NEW DELHI, Jan 5 (IPS) - India’s Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said Monday that his government has delivered a dossier to Pakistan containing evidence of the involvement of Pakistanis in the Mumbai massacre -- an act that strategic experts say amounts to an ultimatum to bring the perpetrators to Indian justice.

Signalling that India is not prepared to accept further vacillation by Pakistan on its demand to extradite the terrorist masterminds responsible for the terrorist strike, Mukherjee said: "We have today handed over to Pakistan evidence of the links with elements in Pakistan of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai on 26 November, 2008.’’

"What happened in Mumbai was an unpardonable crime," Mukherjee said. "As far as the government of Pakistan is concerned, we ask only that it implement the bilateral commitments that it has made at the highest levels to India."

Mukherjee's press conference came just after India's High Commissioner to Pakistan, Satyabrata Pal, met Pakistan Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir at the Foreign Office in Islamabad to hand over, what was officially described as "an information dossier on the status of investigations thus far by India into the Mumbai terrorist attacks".

The dossier includes records of interrogation of arrested terrorist Ajmal Kasab intercepts of the terrorists' communication with handlers in Pakistan during the attack, details of the weapons and equipment recovered, including GPS instruments and satellite phones.

Kasab is the sole survivor of the 10-man squad that carried out the Mumbai attacks and so far Islamabad has refused to acknowledge that he is a Pakistani citizen. Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari said soon after the attacks, which resulted in 185 deaths, that ‘non-state actors’ from Pakistan amy be involved, but then appeared to backtrack.

In a separate press conference, Monday, Indian foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon said: ‘’We don't think there is any such thing as a non-state actor. These non-state actors function within a state. They are citizens of the state. We found that distinction almost impossible to believe"

India, Menon said, expects Pakistan to respond with deeds. "All that we want is action and not words from Pakistan. But, so far, there is no evidence of it.’’

Menon said: ‘’We have given them material that has come up during our investigations. We hope Pakistan will investigate this material that leads to Pakistan, share the results with us and extend to us legal assistance so that we can bring the perpetrators to Indian justice.’’

Menon said that under the conventions of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) grouping Pakistan was obliged to hand over the Mumbai attackers to India. He announced that the dossier would be shared with other countries, including China.

"There is a method in all this,’’ Lalit Mansingh, veteran diplomat and former Indian ambassador to the U.S. told IPS.

"Once the Prime Minister ruled out the military option, the only other way was diplomatic pressure,'' Mansingh said. ''A dossier containing cold hard facts has been handed over which Pakistan cannot ignore. This dossier is going to all the capitals in the world. The government clearly has launched a diplomatic offensive on a war footing".

Part 1 - The Rise of Hindu Zionists
"If we do go to war, psychological operations are going to be absolutely a
critical, critical part of any campaign that we must get involved in": General H. Norman Schwarzkopf "The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.": Joseph Goebbels - Goebbels was Hitler's Minister of Propaganda
Saffron Sarkaar Raj India headed towards Hindu Fascism
Mosque in Parbhani, Maharashtra, where a bomb explosion left many injured, in december 2003. Naresh Kondwar and Himanshu Phanse of Bajrang Dal, who were killed
while making bombs in Nanded in April 2006, were allegedly responsible for bombing the mosque.
Backdrop:
'Samjhauta, Hindi for friendship, Express' is only one of many CBM's that have been undertaken by the two countries to improve relations, was initiated to increase people to people to contact between the two arch rivals. On February 17,2007, the train that travels from Delhi to Lahore was hit by a bomb, killing as many as 68 people. Most of the casualties consisted of Pakistani nationals. Many conspiracy theories were hatched inan attempt to explain what had really gone by.
Indian authorities and the media were quick to assert that the evidence overwhelmingly pointed towards Pakistan and ISI. With the immediate release of sketches of the suspects, it seemed that Indians had it all figured out. For Pakistan it was nothing more than a feeling of déjà vu; India is known to have a history of blaming Pakistan and ISI for the smallest of occurrences in India, hardly ever backing it up with any credible evidence. And so when in 2006 Malegaon, a town in the Nashik district of the Indian state of Maharashtra, located at some 290 km to the northeast of state capital Mumbai, was rattled by a series of bombings, the blame was put on groups having links with Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Maharashtra Police blamed the Student Islamic Movement of India, further linking them to Lashkar-e-Taiba and in turn the ISI. The unlikely twist surfaced recently in India with the arrests of 10 people, including a serving Lieutenant Colonel Prashad Srikant Purohit, a Hindu monk and nun for their alleged involvement in bomb explosions that killed six people in the Muslim-dominated town of Malegaon this year. So far, ten people, including a self-proclaimed Hindu seer and a serving lieutenant colonel, have been arrested for their involvement in the Sep 29 bombing. Besides Purohit, of the accused also include Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Shivnarayan Singh Kalsangram, Shyam Bhawarlal Sahu, Major Ramesh Shivji Upadhyay (retd), Sameer Kulkarni, Rakesh Dattaram Dhavde and Ajay Rahirkar. The suspicion is now directed at the extremist Hindu movement Sangh Parivar, a network linked to a former Major, and now in custody, Ramesh Upadhyay who represents the terrorist organization, Abhinav Bharat.
The chilling part of the entire episode is the involvement of accused Lt Col Purohit in bomb attack on the Samjhauta Express to which he confessed. During investigation Col Purohit has also confessed to training Hindu terrorists for attacking Muslims, besides training them for attacking Samjhauta Express for which he had also supplied them RDX. He further confessed that it was intended to cause armed conflict between Pakistan and India so that anti-Muslim passions could be nurtured in India, leading to violence.
The Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) claimed that Purohit supplied RDX to one “Bhagwan” for Samjhauta Express blast. Public prosecutor Ajay Misar said Abhinav Bharat’s treasurer Ajay Rahirkar had handed Rs2.5 lakh to Lt Col P S Purohit.
Mahant Amritanand Dev alias Dayanand Pandey, the self-styled pontiff who was arrested from Kanpur has revealed that it was under his instructions that Lt. Colonel Shrikant Purohit procured RDX from an army depot that was used in the Malegaon blast. According to reports Pandey was present in all the pre-blast meetings in Bhopal, Jabalpur and Faridabad, monitored operations meticulously and was also responsible for arranging the finances that came in through illegal channels. It is believed that Pandey, a dropout from the National Defence Academy, collaborated with two other accused who are presently on the run - Ramji Kalsangara, who allegedly planted the motorcycle owned by the Hindu ascetic Pragya Singh Thakur in Malegaon, and Sameer Dange.
The suspects have also been questioned for May 2007 blast at Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad and the April 2006 twin blasts at New Delhi's Jama Masjid. In the Mecca Masjid blasts as many as 14 people were killed and over 50 injured. The case was investigated by the city police special wing and was later handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation which could not come to any conclusion. Investigations into the Samjhauta Express explosion and the Jama Masjid blast also failed to make headway and police could not across on any tangible leads.
Police have already established a strong link between Pandey and some of the suspects in the Kanpur blast case through surveillance. On Aug 24, two members of the right-wing Bajrang Dal were killed there while assembling bombs. After the arrest of Panday police is expecting to get some breaking clues in the 2006 Nanded blasts in Maharashtra as well.
The arrests have reinforced growing suspicions over the last few years of a potential threat from Hindu extremists.
Infiltration of Hindu Fascists in Army? Interrogation of Major (retd.) Ramesh Upadhyay unearthed that the Bhonsla Military School in Nashik was used as a training ground by the conspirators. The school has denied its involvement in the blast but it is under the scanner for allowing Bajrang Dal activists to hold training sessions in the use of arms and martial arts.
The school’s links to the RSS is an open secret as it was founded by B.S. Moonje, who was Savarkar’s close friend and who assisted in creating the RSS.
The arrest of the serving army officers and former officers’ link to the recent terror activities points towards a worrisome notion; of the deep infiltration of fundamentalist ideas into Indian army. The critics believe that the constant indoctrination of Hindutva ideology over decades by the VHP, the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and the BJP has resulted in
this kind of violence, which has found its way into crucial state institutions like police force, army and the education departments.
Ram Punyani, secretary of the All India Secular Forum and a human rights activist, said that the deep and widespread ideological indoctrination began years ago but was propagated systematically during the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime. It placed its members in the bureaucracy, particularly in the education department, and in the cultural arena. “RSS people who once headed a department may have retired, but they have ensured that the damage continues, as they would have hired a number of like-minded people. So you can imagine how deep the penetration is. It will take generations to root this out,” said Punyani.
It is a well known fact that once George Fernandes had asked the army chief, the Air Marshal, and the Admiral to report the Kargil war to MPs. When the three obliged to the given orders and the place where meeting was planned , it was the party office of BJ. This is how the Saffron Brigade interferes in the affairs of the armed forces, blatantly. The involvement of serving lieutenant colonel of the Indian army in blasts and in the supplying of 60 kg of RDX for terrorist activities, further casts a shadow over the credibility of the army.
In the past BJP has been offering tickets to the former army officers, (many of them are former generals) for contesting elections for Lok Sabha on behalf of the party and to an extent it has been successful in wooing them. One such retiree is the chief minister of Uttarakhand B C Khanduria retired Major General. Another retired officer Sabyasachi Bagchi who is member of BJP proudly praises the RSS for having developed the character of young people.
SS Raikar of Bhonsla military school, a retired army officer, is believed to have allowed the school premises to be used as a den for making terror schemes and devising conspiracies, besides facilitating arms training and providing accommodation.
The former governor of Jammu and Kashmir Lt General (Rtd) S K Sinha is alleged to have allowed Dyanand Padey to stay in the official residence. Daynand Pandey was hosted by him in Raj Bhawan and the two had held a meeting in a famous temple in Kashmir.
RDX and Army connection: (Chilling clues) Lt Col P S Purohit who provide RDX Samjhota Train blasts and also being interrogated for other bomb blasts in India.
On September two, 2006, Indian police in Ahmednagar seized about 195 kg of cocktail of explosives that included RDX from a local scrap dealer Shankar Shelke which was procured by him from Army Ordnance decommissioned as scrap.
A mobile phone from which he had made over 150 calls was also recovered and during investigation it was found that he had got a cellular connection on a fake name, adding to his already dubious profile.
However, before police could arrest him, Shelke allegedly committed suicide and his employee could not provide any details about him. The case was closed as a suicide, with no further investigation.
The investigations into how the RDX reached some right wing groups allegedly responsible for Malegaon explosions, led to this forgotten case of suicide of Shankar Shelk. Some leads are now emerging that the deadly RDX could have been pilfered during such decommissioning of scrap from the Army.
In the past the law enforcing agencies of India have failed to find out the origin of such explosive used in different blasts, especially in Maharashtra where Bajrang Dal had been imparting explosive and arms training to its activists.
Who is financing 'Hinduvta Terror?' According to ATS, the money needed to finance these plots is generally collected by a self-styled religious leader hailing from Gujarat. According to reports the probe into links of Hindu outfits, accused of terrorism, with Army men brought a few business houses under the examination of Maharashtra's ATS and Central Security agencies, investigating the finances of the group supposedly responsible for Malegaon blast. Sources attached with the probe said that a religious leader from Southern Gujarat was one of those who collected funds from the business houses. According to some other reports foreign funds were used in Malegaon attack.
Reportedly huge amounts of money collected in the US go into the accounts of VHP and other conglomerates of RSS. Sonal Shah and her father Ramesh have been in the core group of VHPA [America] and have been instrumental in sending fund under the name of Eklavya Vidyalaya for backward tribals.
Although the human rights organizations of India complaint that these funds were not used for the backward tribals.
It is also believed that finds collected from abroad by saffron brigade were used in the recent-anti Christian riots in Kanthamal of Orissa and other parts of India and in 2002 against the Muslims of Gujarat. The backward community of Charras was roped in by the RSS to wreak vengeance on the Muslims by slaughtering them. This confession is caught on camera. There is no audit of this fund collected by saffron from US and western countries. ...........................

The lone captured terrorist and alleged Pakistani citizen Ajmal Kassab is dead, sources tell PKKH. Whether he was killed in custody immediately after the Mumbai attacks or in recent days is yet to be confirmed.

On Monday 19th January, Kassab was remanded in police custody until February 2nd. It is important to note that he was not brought to court on this occasion.

Earlier, police in Mumbai had backed off of plans to produce Kasab in court on Thursday December 11th for a routine hearing, citing security concerns.

Indian authorities have repeatedly denied media access to Ajmal Kassab and have turned down requests from the Pakistani authorities for a DNA sample for Kassab. This is consistent with the inability of the Indian authorities to provide any information (finger prints, DNA) of the other nine alleged perpetrators of the Mumbai Attacks.

Due to the nature of this information and the lack of verifiable sources, we are not able to confirm or dismiss the reports of Kassab’s death at the moment. However, India’s reluctance to allow the Pakistani authorities access to Kassab and refusal to carry out a joint investigation certainly raises questions about the authenticity of Indian claims.

Pakistan's national investigative body, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) believes that the Mumbai terror attacks were planned in Europe.

The result of a probe into the attacks show the master plan was developed in a European country, a senior FIA official told Press TV.

The official, who was talking on condition of anonymity, said the Pakistani government of Asif Ali Zardari was still undecided over providing the country with evidence.

Declining to name any state, the official added that the report will be presented through a diplomatic channel to the Indian government in the next two days.

In late November a series of ten coordinated terror attacks rocked India's largest city. At least 170 people, including 22 foreigners, were killed and 300 more were injured.

India blamed Pakistani-based "elements" over the attacks across its financial capital, saying the terror bore the fingerprint of Lashkar-e-Taiba -- a group blamed for previous attacks in India.

India has provided Pakistan with data from satellite phones used by the attackers as well as what it describes as the 'confessions of a sole surviving gunman', who participated in the attacks, to support its claims.

However the Pakistani official said their findings rule out the involvement of any Pakistani group or organizations in the Mumbai attacks.

"The report further disclosed that there were no Pakistani group or organization involved in the attacks, however the government is investigating to make the report more transparent," the official concluded.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani announced on Sunday that Islamabad has completed its probe into the Mumbai attacks and would soon share this with India.

"The (Indian) dossier (on Mumbai) has been investigated and has been forwarded to the Ministry of Justice and after their approval, I will take you into confidence," he told reporters upon returning from the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos._________________Simon - http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/

Hindu terrorism, what Hemant Karkare was investigating when he was killed in the opening shots of the Mumbai massacre.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwWKBHlvZUA
"If you cannot deliver justice in the killings of 2000 people you're in trouble".

"Everything is being registered by the media. You must inflict the maximum damage. Fight to the end. Don't leave any survivors," read one of the excerpts, in a call to an attacker at the Trident-Oberoi hotel.

A western media report has claimed that the last year's terror attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai were partly planned in the US.

Gunmen behind Mumbai raids used cell phones that were activated in the US and paid for with funds sent from Italy Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.

The revelation comes after New Delhi sent the intelligence information to some Western countries so investigators could expose any ties to the network behind the November raids.

The Italian daily said that the Italian security forces were also investigating a wire transfer sent to the US from the northern Italian city of Brescia.

The message was sent by a Pakistani- suspect, named as Javaid Iqbal. Iqbal also sent the funds via Western Union to pay for five cell phones with Austrian country codes.

But the cell phones were activated in the US by an American company and registered to an Indian citizen, it said.

Based on the report, at least three of these phones were used by the militants during the Mumbai siege.

"Everything is being registered by the media. You must inflict the maximum damage. Fight to the end. Don't leave any survivors," read one of the excerpts, in a call to an attacker at the Trident-Oberoi hotel.

MUMBAI, India (AP) — The state-appointed lawyer for the Pakistani suspect charged in last year's Mumbai terror attacks was barred from representing him Wednesday because of a conflict of interest, a special judge said moments before the trial was to begin.

Trial judge M.L. Tahiliyani said lawyer Anjali Waghmare had failed to disclose that she had also represented a witness injured in the attacks in a compensation claim case.

Tahiliyani said he would appoint a new lawyer for the suspect, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, but the development would delay the opening of the much-anticipated trial.

"I don't want to appoint a junior or raw lawyer for him," he said.

Police say Kasab was the only gunman captured during the November attacks in Mumbai, which left 164 people dead. He could face the death penalty if he is convicted of 12 criminal counts, including murder and waging war against India.

Kasab stood barefoot in the courtroom, dressed in a gray T-shirt and blue Adidas pants, his hair shaggy and his beard scruffy. In his first public appearance, he chatted and chuckled with his co-defendants, Faheem Ansari and Sabauddin Ahmed, both Indian nationals charged with helping plot the attacks.

Kasab also asked judge Tahiliyani to get him a Pakistani lawyer, to which the judge replied that a similar request from him had already been forwarded to the Pakistani consulate without any reply.

"Please try one more time," Kasab asked Tahiliyani, to which the judge replied, "OK."

The court will meet Thursday morning to decide on Kasab's legal defense, the judge said.

Preparations have been made for the trial to begin in a special bombproof courtroom set up in the central Mumbai jail where Kasab is being held.

A sea of khaki-clad police and special forces wielding assault rifles surrounded the courthouse Wednesday in an unprecedented show of security. Reporters covering the trial were fingerprinted, issued two special passes, searched three times — and offered pens because they were not allowed to bring their own.

The trial has already faced several delays as security arrangements were made.

India has blamed the Mumbai attacks on Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist militant group widely believed to have been created by Pakistani intelligence agencies in the 1980s to fight Indian rule in the divided Kashmir region.

Pakistani officials have acknowledged that the attacks were partly plotted on their soil and announced criminal proceedings against eight suspects. They have also acknowledged that Kasab is a Pakistani national.

Indian police have also filed charges against two Indian citizens suspected of aiding the attackers.

Mumbai suspect is US double agent, India claims
An American man charged with plotting the attacks on Mumbai was a double agent for both the United States and al-Qaeda terror group Lashkar e Taiba, Indian officials have claimed.

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
Published: 6:22PM GMT 16 Dec 2009

David Headley, a Pakistan-born American national arrested in Chicago in October, is alleged to have carried out reconnaissance missions in the run-up to the Mumbai attacks, in which 166 people were killed.

He is also believed to have been present in the terrorists' "control room" in Pakistan where their handlers directed the killing spree over an open telephone line.

According to Indian officials, Headley travelled to India again in March this year, with the knowledge of American agencies who did not inform their Indian counterparts. During the trip, Headley is alleged to have collected intelligence for future terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets, including India's National Defence College.

Indian officials are desperate to question Headley but have been frustrated by American refusals to grant them access. A team of Indian investigators travelled to Washington shortly after Headley was arrested in October but soon returned after their American counterparts told them they would not be able to meet him.

They want to question him about the Mumbai attacks involved Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency in any way and the role of Indian extremists in providing logistical support.

American officials say that under US law they cannot force any person in their custody to give evidence to foreign agencies. But Indian intelligence officers have questioned why Washington is not doing more to help their own inquiry and suggested Headley's connections with American intelligence agencies is behind the reluctance.

Headley, who was born Daood Syed Gilani and schooled in Pakistan before moving to Philadelphia with his American mother in 1977, was convicted of smuggling heroin into the United States in 1998. He served only 15 months in jail after agreeing to become an informant for the Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA). He changed his name to David Headley in 2006.

According to Indian officials he continued to serve as a DEA informant until shortly before his arrest in October. Indian intelligence sources believe Headley may have been recruited to work for the CIA which, along with the FBI, shared intelligence with the DEA and other government agencies after the creation of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre in 2004.

B. Raman, a former senior official in India's intelligence agency, said: "He was working for Lashkar e Taiba, taking photographs and video recordings of the [Mumbai] hotels and harbour. And he was an agent for the DEA on drugs, so in that sense he was a double agent.

"Indian officials are very keen to question him about his network, but we can't because we might find out about any connections with the CIA or ISI. They don't want that to happen. The Americans say 'you ask us what you want us to find out and we'll share the information'," he added.

The Indian press is abuzz with news that Indian Home Ministry officials are investigating whether a terror suspect in the Mumbai attacks, David Headley from Chicago, was working as a 'double agent' with the US.

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